The Taliban appear to have strategized embarrassing new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. As he arrived in Kabul on his first visit to Afghanistan, a suicide bomber on a bicycle detonated his payload in front of the Ministry of Defense, killing nine civilian bystanders. This was obviously a purely symbolic act, since it did no damage at all to the Ministry of Defense or the Afghanistan National Army.
A second bombing, in Khost, killed another 9 persons, including several children and a policeman.
Hagel arrives in Kabul as relations between the government of Hamid Karzai and the US are strained. Karzai has recently expelled US special forces from Wardak Province next to Kabul, on the ground that they were deploying Afghan death squads as a auxiliaries.
Afghan families are demanding an inquiry into the Wardak activities of the US special forces and their auxiliaries:
NATO denies the allegations.
Dear lord what are we doing in this drug infested third world country? I look at the picture featuring the hopeless children and think of how the arms industry, the industrial complex along with Afghan officials/warlords are siphoning off billions of US dollars each month, while the Afghan population lives their lives just above the level of dogs.
All the while Lindsey Graham and McCain proclaim us as Afghanistan’s might liberators who must stay to complete the job.
He also got a suicide bomber greeting in Pakistan and the PM used the occasion to say Pakistan will build the nat gas pipeline from Iran despite massive pressure and sanctions threat from the US not to do it. To me this illustrated the incoherence of our policy. We want to be come a top nat gas exporter but we don’t want Pakistan to trade with Iran? or have factories or fuel?
I can only think of 1 good reason for there to be any US military personnel in Afghanistan —
to recover American POW Bowe Bergdahl.
After a couple of months off, Chris Floyd returns and notes this comment about Chavez”
“As’ad Abu Khalil points us to this rather eye-boggling — and revealing — passage from AP’s obituary of Hugo Chavez:
Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.
My god, to think such evil once walked this earth!”
Abu Khalil blogs here
link to angryarab.blogspot.co.uk
“Karzai has recently expelled U.S. special forces from Wardak province….on the ground they were deploying Afghan death squads as auxiliaries.”
U.S. government support for death squads dates back to California in the 1850s when they were used against American Indians and received federal funding. The “School of the Americas” in Georgia trained Latin American soldiers in the finer aspects of intelligence and covert operations – one of the trainees was Roberto D’Abuisson, an El Salvadoran military intelligence officer who later became a top political leader in that nation after commanding death squad operations that killed thousands – including Archbishop Romero. The “Los Pepes” death squads in Colombia were believed to be trained by U.S. Armed Forces personnel. The CIA-sponsored Phoenix Program in Vietnam resulted in the killing of 26,000 Vietnamese. The CIA provided logistics and training for the Operation Condor intelligence network in the panhandle of South America established in the mid-1970s to combat leftist elements in that region via abduction, torture and murder – it left 60,000 dead. The CIA trained SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police in Iran that tortured and killed thousands of Iranian citizens.
Death squads are a lot like drone strikes – they are a form of state-sponsored extrajudicial killing that the U.S. intelligence community and military has seen as a “short cut” to defeating opposition to governments friendly to the U.S. Forget about such things as due process or the Geneva Conventions – death squads conveniently serve American interests.
Kudos to President Karzai for standing up to the formation of death squads in his country.